Toshiba no-glasses 3D TV out by Xmas?

Toshiba's keeping mum, but Japanese daily paper the Yomiuri Shimbun has claimed the manufacturer is about to launch a 3D TV that doesn't require viewers wear special glasses.

There's nothing new here - various vendors, LG and Philips to name but two, have shown off specs-free 3D screens at trade shows for some years now - but Toshiba's offering will be the first to come to market at consumer price points.

That said, buyers will still need to be fairly well-heeled, we suspect.

According to the paper, Toshiba will take the wraps off three such tellies before Christmas.

For its part, Toshiba later confirmed that it is working on the technology that would make glasses-free 3D TV possible, but it hasn't commented on the Yomiuri Shimbun story and the suggested release timetable.

Nintendo's upcoming 3DS handheld games console will have lenticular screens of the kind that can show a stereoscopic 3D image without the need for polarising or active-shutter glasses. Scaling up the technology from small mobile display to big HD TV isn't of itself hard, but has been prohibitively expensive to date. ®